The Pain Nurse

by Jon Talton

  This only made Amy’s shoulders heave more until she said, in a very clear voice, “Why are people so cruel to each other?”

  “I don’t know.” That they were was the policeman’s paycheck.

  “I bet you’ve seen some pretty bad things,” she said.

  Will said he had.

  “Did you ever play around on your wife?”

  “No,” he lied. The dynamic was going his way and he didn’t dare any diversions that might keep him from the chance to find out why she had been talking to the doctor about police and Cheryl Beth. He gently moved his arm from her shoulders, resting his hand on her arm.

  “I didn’t think so. You’re a good man. I always fall for the bad boys.” She gave a teary sniffle-laugh.

  “Well, he’s a fool if he doesn’t appreciate you. You’ve got way too much going for you to put up with that.”

  “He’s married.”

  “I figured that,” Will said. “It doesn’t make you a bad person. Stuff happens.”

  “He said he’d leave his wife. God, I sound like such a dummy.”

  Will didn’t say anything. He could hear a siren in the far distance, through the very quiet hum contained in the hospital walls.

  “He was having an affair with someone else, too. He didn’t leave his wife for her, but I thought it would be different with me. He probably told her the same lines. He’s a doctor, of course. They think they’re gods. Such a sense of entitlement.”

  “You deserve better,” Will said.

  “Oh, god, I don’t know what I deserve. This has gone so bad.”

  “So kick him to the curb. If I wasn’t crippled, I’d be chasing you around the room.”

  She laughed and put her hand on top of his. “It’s really bad. I’m really afraid.”

  After she fell silent for several minutes, he coaxed her. Why was she afraid?

  “You’re a cop, right? Police officer, I mean.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What happens if someone lies to the police?”

  His side was killing him from being twisted in her direction. The muscles were twitching like little earthquakes. He didn’t dare move. “It’s not good. It could make someone an accessory to a crime.” It could also be just giving a false statement, but why tell her that? She gave a sharp intake of breath. Her head was down and all he could see of her eyes were long blond lashes.

  “He was her husband, you know. The man I’ve been involved with.”

  “Whose husband?”

  “Dr. Lustig. Gary is her husband. It happened so fast between us. We’ve been seeing each other only about two months. He said they were getting a divorce.”

  “It’s okay, Amy. Have you lied to the police?”

  She nodded once, half an inch up and down.

  “Are you going to have me arrested?”

  “No. But you have to make it right.”

  “I’m afraid. I could lose my job. He could blackball me.”

  “You’re not that way, Amy,” Will said. “I’ve seen the way you work with the quads. You’re no quitter. You won’t let any of us quit. Right?”

  The pretty head nodded, more adamantly this time.

  “Who asked you to lie to the police?”

  “Gary.”

  “This was Dr. Lustig’s husband, Gary Nagle?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he ask you to tell the police?”

  Amy looked him straight on. “He wanted me to say that we were together the night she was murdered.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Dr. Gary Nagle was a man with a secret and he wanted his girlfriend to lie for him. It didn’t matter much to Will, unless it would help focus Dodds’ mind, get him off his theory that Cheryl Beth had anything to do with the murder. Knowing Dodds, however, he realized this new information might cause him to wonder if Cheryl Beth and Nagle had acted together to eliminate a wife that was in the way. He would have thought the same, if all the evidence hadn’t pointed to the real killer. Nagle’s secret was a distraction. Any other explanation was too fantastic: that Nagle himself was the Slasher. And what? He killed the other women to throw the police off, in preparation for killing Christine Lustig? Will chuckled to himself as he wheeled down the empty hallway, back to another dreary night trapped in neuro-rehab. He didn’t even have a shower to look forward to—that wasn’t until tomorrow night. And he wouldn’t be expecting a morning visit from Cindy, ever again.

  He rolled down the slight incline through another set of automatic doors and then he was in the old hospital tower, with its narrower hallways and drab, fading walls. He passed a waiting area that was empty except for one young man, wearing jeans, a black T-shirt, and a jacket. He was tapping into one of those personal data assistants—is that what they called them?—while he had an agitated conversation on the cell phone. He lowered his voice as he saw Will roll past. So many sad stories in the hospital.

  In a minute he would reach the main elevator bank then take the elevator down to his “home.” But he had to pee like a sonofabitch. The feeling had come upon him suddenly, as it always did now. It was as if he were inhabiting someone else’s body and starting all over learning about it, and it sure as hell didn’t work as well as his old body, the one lost to the tumor. The hallway ahead of him mostly consisted of long, empty walls, white with pastel stripes, as if you followed them long enough they might lead to Oz or someplace wonderful. The one thing lacking was any sign of a restroom. But he reached a narrow corridor leading to the right with a restroom sign and an arrow. This passage was unlighted and he depended on the light coming in off the main hall to guide him. He glided in ten feet and touched the door. It opened and he turned on the lights. He desperately didn’t want to urinate on himself.

  Now it was the tricky part. There had never been a graduation ceremony where he could get to the toilet by himself. It had just happened, with him on his own and the nurses so distracted with the worse-off patients. He couldn’t stand, of course. He angled the wheelchair by the toilet seat and locked the wheels into place. Next he kicked up the footrests—this took more doing with the one for his weak left leg—and slid himself to the edge of the seat. With one fluid motion he used the railing on the wall by the toilet to pull himself over. Then he took down his sweatpants and relieved himself. The bathroom lacked the usual call button with a long string, in case a patient fell and needed help. It was also ancient, with tile so old it was mottled with decades of dirt and efforts to remove it. Tile pieces were coming apart where they had retrofitted the handicapped railing into the wall. When he was done, he repeated the moves in reverse. One bad move and he would have been helplessly on the floor.

  Ready…flex…shift. He was back in the chair. He washed his hands and used the hand sanitizer he had become obsessive about, knowing he was surrounded by germs and illness. When he backed the wheelchair out of the restroom he saw it. At the end of the short, dim corridor was an elevator door. He had been all over this part of the old tower but he never knew there was another elevator outside the big bank of six elevators at the center of the building. Now here was this: a small set of unmistakable elevator doors. The buttons were black and stuck out half an inch, something from the fifties maybe. This whole end of the corridor smelled like dust. He wheeled his way there and pressed the down button. He was surprised to hear a distant motor whirring.

  The car arrived and the doors pulled back, revealing a long, narrow space. Unlike the spacious cars at the main elevators, this could fit at best one bed, maybe not even that. Whatever the small, rogue elevator’s purpose, it didn’t look as if it had been used much for years. Unlike the hospital, it had a distinct sour smell. A single fixture in the center of the ceiling provided light; it held a hundred dead bugs. The floor was broken linoleum, the color of dying winter lawn. The walls were linoleum bracketed by long metal strips. Once the walls must have been as white as an old nurse’s cap, but now they were fading, too. A dozen prominent scars told of years of banging car
ts and beds against them. Will wheeled the chair in and turned around. Down the hallway the main corridor of the hospital was known and safe. He looked at it a long time, keeping the doors open with his hand. Finally, he let them close with a creaky bang. He pressed the old black button that read B, and the car lurched, making a deep, echoing clang, then found its footing and began a smooth descent.

  The door opened on the blackest dark he had ever experienced. The little overhead light of the elevator barely penetrated past the threshold. A musty smell assaulted his nose. The door started to close as if it didn’t want to linger in such blackness. Will dug into his fanny pack and pulled out the small flashlight he had kept in it since long before it became his bag of provisions in the hospital. Powered by two C-cell batteries, it was enough to illuminate a few feet in front of him. Still, he hesitated and stayed in the elevator car, keeping the door open. Ahead of him was a ten-foot-deep space with scuffed gray walls and rubber mats over a broken gray linoleum floor. No light switch was visible. Then the space made an abrupt right turn.

  Will hadn’t been afraid of the dark since he was six years old. He had to banish that fear to take care of his younger brother, who had night terrors. It was a good attribute for a policeman, who might be alone in the empty night inside one of the abandoned industrial cathedrals of Cincinnati. But he still hesitated, studying the utilitarian walls ahead of him, somehow comforted by the fragile light of the elevator car. But there were questions. Questions he and Dodds had never answered. It had been that kind of case. The door banged against his hand and the car started buzzing. Will clenched the small flashlight in his teeth and wheeled himself out onto the rubber mat. The elevator closed behind him and he was alone, armed with the small cone of light.

  His hands pushed lightly, moving the well-machined wheels of the wheelchair forward. He stopped at the angle and took the flashlight in his hand to play across the next space. A nearby wall held an old time clock. Like so many antiques, it had a black metal plaque with the manufacturer’s name and “Cincinnati, Ohio.” So many things used to be made in this city. The clock was broken at 12:13 and covered with dust. He made a quick sweep with the light and at first thought this might have been an old kitchen. It was a large room with tile walls, metal shelves, large sinks, and what looked like freezer doors. Water and rust stains marked the walls. A rickety wooden ladder sat askew against one. The silence wrapped around him.

  But it was no kitchen. It was a morgue.

  A shiver slithered up his left shoulder blade to his neck. It was a silly thing. He had been in countless morgues. Here, the distinctive porcelain autopsy tables were still in place. In new postmortem labs they tended to be stainless steel and fancy. This place was old and probably hadn’t been used in years. The old elevator must have been used to bring down the dead, out of the sight of families and patients. Still, the smell of decaying flesh lingered. Will gave it a once-over with the flashlight and rolled toward a set of double doors.

  He knew he was on borrowed time. The pain meds Cheryl Beth had given him would soon wear off and he was far from the nurses’ station in neuro-rehab. He pushed the chair to the double doors. They were secure, but he noticed the remains of a push bar. The bar was gone but the lever was still in place. He leaned against it and the doors gave way. Now he was in a long, wide, dark corridor, but a bank of fluorescent lights was visible maybe a hundred feet away. And suddenly he knew exactly where he was.

  Christine Lustig’s office was a hundred and twenty feet straight ahead. Cheryl Beth had walked down this hallway alone that night, finding a nude body with dozens of slash marks. She might have seen the doctor’s clothes folded neatly on a desk or a shelf. Did she scream that night, out into the empty dark hallway? Did the killer know Cheryl Beth was going to be there?

  Will turned back to the doors to the old morgue. They were tightly locked and the buttons on the latches refused to budge. But when he trained the beam of the flashlight on where the doors joined, he saw how the lock could easily be picked. He was playing a hunch, a long shot. But it might not only answer a question about the night Lustig was killed, but also one of the most puzzling issues about the Mount Adams Slasher. He fished in the fanny pack and pulled out a slender black-and-silver object. He pressed his thumb against the button and a blade flashed out and locked into place. It was a switchblade he had taken off a suspect years ago and he had kept it. It was illegal and useful in tough situations. Will slipped the blade between the doors and easily released the latch. He pulled the door open and wheeled himself back inside. He discovered the lights and, using the knife instead of his fingers, turned them on. Gradually the old fluorescents came alive, giving the spacious room a yellow-green tint. He carefully studied his surroundings.

  A newer plastic wastebasket sat by one shelf. Inside were torn condom wrappers and used condoms. Some of the living had been having fun down here. He wheeled himself to the dozen freezer drawers, lined in two rows one on top of the other. He pulled down his sleeve to cover his hand to keep his fingerprints off the handles and began opening the doors. The refrigerator hadn’t been on in years and the decaying flesh smell worsened. Meanwhile, pain was starting to radiate out of the middle of his back like mercury rising in a thermometer on a summer day. It scared him more than the old morgue around him.

  Just a little more time. A little more…

  It was the drawer on the lower tier, one drawer in from the left. Will slowly pulled out the body tray, making a loud metal-on-metal racket. Just inside was a black trash bag. He carefully folded back the bag and saw the bloody clothes. Using the switchblade, he poked through the fabric until he found something solid. The knife hooked into it and Will pulled. The blade had caught on a lanyard used to hold an ID card. It was the kind of hospital identification Will had seen on every employee at Cincinnati Memorial. This one was caked with dried, dark blood, but not so much that Will couldn’t see the photo of a beautiful, auburn-haired woman and the lettering. It said Christine D. Lustig, MD.

  Chapter Seventeen

  She wanted nothing more than a long, hot shower and a Bushmills on the rocks. She could almost feel the softness of the robe against her as she waited to take her first sip. She would make it downstairs, bring the drink up to her bedroom, and lock herself in with her music and a book. With the commotion and arrest today, there was no reason she couldn’t get back to her old habits and just enjoy the downstairs. But not tonight. The day had been too intense. In addition to Lennie, she had been overloaded with patients. Just as she had been leaving, she had been paged to the emergency room with Trauma Team One. An ambulance had brought in a burn patient.

  He should have gone straight to the burn center at University Hospital, but there had been a mix-up. Now they had to stabilize him. A twenty-three-year-old kid who had been using gasoline to set a building on fire. He had deep, thick burns on both legs and the smell of burned flesh filled the exam room. The usual morphine dose didn’t work, of course—too many years using narcotics on the street. He moaned and screamed like a child. Just seeing the team set up made him more agitated. Cheryl Beth pushed as far as she could to ramp up the IV morphine dose, but he never really settled down. She could still smell the burned flesh.

  A hot shower and a Bushmills would settle her down. She might even smile recalling how the cop in the wheelchair had taken Lennie down. But after she left the parking garage, she pulled into the valet parking lane at the hospital and watched the garage behind her. Soon the Honda Accord emerged. She couldn’t explain why she did what she did next. It just happened. She let the car reach the end of the block, where the long red light annoyed drivers, and she pulled out behind him. It was as simple and foolhardy as lingering beside that car, which had caused her to see the letter inside, addressed to Christine Lustig.

  She was only half a block along when he turned right on Madison and disappeared. She gunned the little Saturn engine to keep up and made a rolling stop at the light. He was already several blocks down the avenue. Tra
ffic was light and the asphalt was dry. Would he keep going straight into Walnut Hills, Mount Lookout, and Hyde Park? No. He turned onto Interstate 71 and headed north. She felt her stomach in a vise, but pushed to make it through the light so she could follow him. Soon they were both going seventy. Cheryl Beth had never tailed anyone in her life. She had only seen it done on television. It was an odd guilty, exhilarating feeling. She hung back several car lengths, trying to keep herself from being distracted by other taillights.

  The Accord took the Galbraith Road exit, shining silver under the streetlights as it exited the freeway. Cheryl Beth followed, slowing to let another car get between them. They took the green light and drove past the deserted Kenwood Towne Center and its vast parking lot. The normally crowded suburban roads were placid. The business signs glowed merrily. She was so far behind on her Christmas shopping. That all seemed a grotesque joke now. All the Santa Claus red only reminded her of Christine on the floor, awash in her own blood. She nervously started checking the gas tank: the gauge showed a quarter of a tank.

  They went more than a mile on Galbraith and turned into a residential street, then followed a spaghetti of streets past cul-de-sacs and look-alike houses with big garage doors. This part of town had a mix of houses, older subdivisions with ranches and tri-levels from the 1950s and 1960s, some very old surviving farmhouses, and the newer, large houses that had been built as the mall expanded. She couldn’t believe how much it had grown since she had first moved to Cincinnati to go to nursing school. These houses looked only a few years old. The trash hampers were all neatly moved to the curb for tomorrow’s pickup. Cheryl Beth hated it out here. She imagined Andy was now living in a house just like these somewhere on the outskirts of Corbin, with his new wife and children. New wife! Cheryl Beth and Andy had been divorced for more than fifteen years. She laughed at herself, hanging as far back as she could without losing the red taillight beacons ahead. The Accord suddenly slowed and swung into a driveway, as a garage door opened and the garage light flooded into the cold night.